Backwards
by InfiniteRegress
Summary: Nothing is as it seems. They told us that. What we didn't know is that there is a movie that influenced season 4 that they didn't mention. This is the real story behind season 4, so far. One-shot.


_A/N: There is a quote from 'Drunk History' that describes my coping mechanism for Rookie Blue season 4. I'd like to share it with you. This way you'll know what you are getting yourself into. "It all makes so much sense, when you think about it like a crazy person."_

_By the way, I'm making you read this story in reverse. I thought it was apt given this ass backward season._

_Do not bail at the first sentence. It's going to be fine. This is a McSwarek fic._

_Disclaimer. I do not own Rookie Blue_

What I Lost

She was kissing Nick Collins. She used large sweeping motions to remove his jacket. They knocked over a coat hanger. In the instructional videos she was given, that seemed to be some kind of foreplay. She didn't really get it, but this was the first time so she figured she better stick to what she had learned. So she knocked over a lamp next. She really did not understand what women saw in this activity. Then Nick Collins pushed her over the couch and came down on top of her. He was giving her slow kisses and he had great abs and that was much more pleasurable. "Hmm."

XXXXXXXXXX

He was lying on his stomach, sideways on Marlo Cruz's bed. He was not emotionally or intellectually stimulated at all. But the instructional manuals he had been given said that this is how adult males behaved in a committed relationship. He also didn't think paint fights were all that sexy. So much mess to clean up later. But he would have to fake it to maintain his cover. He was beginning to wonder if some kind of joke was being played on him. He was so bored.

For Better or Worse

His hand had started to develop a tremor as he spoke to Oliver Shaw about happiness. As he watched her enter the wedding reception with Nick Collins, the tremor progressed into an uncontrollable shaking. After he knocked over his drink, he hastily headed to the restroom under the pretext of cleaning up. He pushed his way into a stall and closed the door behind him.

Once out of sight of prying eyes, he popped his hand off at the wrist. Sitting down on the toilet, he stuck the hand between his knees and pulled out a screw driver. After fiddling with the circuitry for a few minutes to correct the malfunction, he reattached the hand and flexed each finger to test their dexterity. Digits now in proper working order, he figured it was time to head home.

Friday the 13th

He was still working his way through those books on how to be a better boyfriend. One of them suggested closing the emotional distance between him and his significant other. So he confessed a secret to Marlo Cruz. "I like tool sheds."

For an artificial intelligence, a tool shed represented safety and security. It had all the materials required to preserve their existence indefinitely. But he couldn't risk betraying his mission by telling Marlo Cruz that, so he made up some story about how his father had locked him in a tool shed as punishment as a child. Those books said something about women liking being able to fix a man.

XXXXXXXXXX

Andy headed down a flight of stairs in an abandoned building, while Nick hesitated at the top, flashlight in hand, scared of things that went bump in the night.

Andy let out a scream and then giggled silently. Sam had just grabbed her around the waist, at the bottom of the stairs. Luckily Nick thought Andy was still teasing him. It gave Sam some time to kiss and lick and nibble.

Sam led Andy into a blocked off room. Inside the room Andy saw a bunch of old mannequins and her doppelganger. It was eerie.

"You haven't been doing anything pervy with that thing, have you?" Andy asked.

Sam could tell she was only teasing and answered in a similar vein, "No. You haven't gotten closer to Army boy than you should, have you?"

"No. I was eating my heart out for you, Sam Swarek." Andy answered with her heart in her eyes.

Sam took Andy's hand in his. Their hearts were mended, their trust absolute, and their love indestructible.

Sam flipped the 'ON' switch on Andy's doppelganger and sent her out to fill in for Andy McNally while she was gone. After a close call, where Nick nearly found them which wasn't really even close enough to stop them from making out, Sam and Andy took off.

XXXXXXXXXX

Andy walked through the parking lot of 15 Division, smoothie in hand, feeling lighter than she had in, well, forever. She certainly hadn't been this happy since before Jerry died and Sam had broken up with her. Andy barely spared a glance for Marlo and whatever he was.

Andy wasn't nervous at all. She would miss her friends, but she and Sam could do good work. Save lives. Andy had learned her lessons being separated from Sam. They were better together than apart. They could face anything as long as they did it as partners. They would fight to stay together when things got tough. Andy McNally would go with Sam Swarek to the ends of the Earth. Beyond.

XXXXXXXXXX

Sam Swarek was waiting impatiently for Andy McNally. He knew she couldn't resist getting her smoothie and would show up at the truck, eventually. When she arrived, Sam made his move.

He was trying to play it cool because what he had to tell Andy was going to sound insane. But he couldn't quite keep the longing out of his eyes. Sam had been starved for the sight of Andy McNally. Sam was desperate to hear her ramble on about some small little detail of her life. He could listen to her go on forever, even if it was about citrus. It had been quiet for far too long.

When Andy claimed that she didn't really know Sam and informed him that he had a girlfriend, Sam grumbled something about killing his beta. Andy cracked a joke, asking Sam if he was alpha of a werewolf pack now.

Sam didn't laugh at her joke. He gently grabbed Andy's shoulders and turned her around. But he couldn't resist pulling her back into his embrace, looping his arms around her and splaying his hands over her waist. Andy couldn't help leaning back into him. She sighed, back where she belonged. Sam jerked his head against hers to get her attention. Sam directed Andy's gaze to a man walking down the street. As that man turned the corner Andy got a good look at his face.

There were two Sam Swareks. No. Andy knew she was wrong. This man who held her was right, when everything, since she had come back from undercover, had been horribly wrong. This man that held her was Sam, her Sam. The other, he was an impostor.

Sam told Andy everything. He started with "I love you, Andy."

Skeletons

Something woke Marlo Cruz. There was a dim light across the bedroom. Marlo turned over in bed only to see her lover's head on the dresser. His headless body was searching blindly through the drawers. Suddenly his brown eyes snapped open and he said "Go back to sleep, Marlo. You're just having a bad dream."

Beta-Sam reattached his head and crawled into bed. In moments he was asleep but Marlo could not find any rest. Nothing like this had ever happened before, not even when the bipolar had gotten really bad last time. Maybe it was her medication. She needed to go see her psychiatrist in the morning, but Marlo wasn't sure that she could tell her doctor this.

Poison Pill

Beta-Sam was careful to scrupulously ignore Andy McNally when she returned to 15 Division with Marlo Cruz after the anthrax scare. He did everything he could to not even meet her eyes. He was still a little worried that he had even dared to ask her how she was doing over the phone earlier. He didn't want to be dismembered permanently.

The Kids Are Not Alright

Beta-Sam was nearly assassinated by a Xandoxan. He wasn't sure if he or Swarek was the target, but he was beginning to suspect that his role in this whole thing was either bait or a distraction. Neither was going to turn out particularly well for him.

Beta-Sam disposed of the body as quickly and quietly as possible. When Diaz and Epstein rolled up, he informed them that he had already contacted Guns and Gangs about the reports of shots fired but hadn't seen any other sign of suspicious activity.

Beta-Sam could have disappeared and protected himself after that incident. Any other Beta unit would have. But he moved beyond his programming that night. Something about working with the officers at 15 Division had taught him about what it meant to protect and serve. But Sam Swarek still scared the crap out of him.

Different Not Better

"What is her talent?" Beta-Sam muttered to himself. There was a little known glitch in the coding of Beta units. They were know-it-alls, but when they came across a question they couldn't answer they got caught in some sort of infinite loop. They became ornery and mean. They focused on the question and finding the answer. It would slip in at inopportune moments, distracting from the job they had to do. Eventually they would have a meltdown or a tantrum. Call it what you will.

But even to avoid all this, a Beta unit would never directly ask for the answer because that would be admitting that they didn't, in fact, know everything.

"Stating the obvious, that's your talent McNally." Beta-Sam said sarcastically.

"No, I know when to give up." Andy McNally responded, defeated.

Beta-Sam turned to say something. He wanted to tell her that Sam Swarek would never want her to do that. But Beta units were, in their hearts, cowards. Something about the possibility of living forever made them afraid. While creatures with finite lives sometimes showed great bravery, Beta units tended to guard their longevity jealously. So Beta-Sam remained silent, blinking soulfully.

Homecoming

Oliver walked Andy out of the Black Penny and put her in a cab. His heart was breaking for the rookie, not that she was a rookie anymore. He did his best to try to get her to fight. To make sure she didn't give up on Sam Swarek.

You see, Oliver was the only person who Sam told he was leaving again and why. The last thing Sam asked of Oliver was that he take care of Andy until Sam came home to her.

Surprises

Sam opened up the trunk and inside was the Beta unit that had been sent to replace him. Sam had knocked him out and locked him in when he returned to help save Andy when her undercover assignment went sideways.

He'd seen her only for that one brief moment in the back of that truck. He hadn't dared touch her because he knew if he started he could never stop.

But now that Andy was home from undercover, while he was still stuck trying to wrap up his own situation, he had some warnings he needed to deliver before he could leave again.

"If you so much as touch Andy McNally, in any way whatsoever, I will rip off your head and shove it so far up your ass that you will spend the rest of your life trying to pull it out." Sam threatened.

The Beta unit believed that Sam Swarek could do it. It was anatomically possible. His parts did detach. The Beta unit was also more than a little convinced that Sam Swarek was actively looking forward to doing it. In that moment, the Beta unit decided to try to push Andy McNally away for his own survival.

This would lead to an unfortunate amount of heartache for Andy McNally. However, in the grand scheme of things, that was better than the clusterfuck that have would occurred if Andy ended up in bed with a poor imitation of Sam Swarek only to be eventually reunited with the real thing.

I Never

Sam had made promises. He promised Andy that he would do it all. Sam would show Andy every single day that he loved her and that he wouldn't bail on her when things got tough again.

Things were pretty tough right now. Andy hadn't met him for a drink that night at the Penny, she had left on an undercover assignment instead. Sam understood, but it was hard. Maybe it had to be hard for Andy to believe him this time.

Sam Swarek wasn't going to break those promises to Andy McNally ever again. He was going to wait for her and prove that she could count on him to stick around even when she was the one that wasn't there.

The Black Penny had gotten a vintage arcade game called 'Star Raiders'. Sam played it every night while he waited for Andy McNally to come home from undercover. He had gotten good at it, really good.

Then one evening he was approached as he left the Penny. "You've been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against the Ko-Dan armada." Sam raised an eyebrow that was met with "The arcade game was a test. You have the high score. If you join us you'll be saving everyone. If you don't everyone you love will be inevitably enslaved or killed."

Before Sam could ask the man if he was joking or insane, he pulled out, well you can really only call it a death-ray gun, and disintegrated a lizard-type creature. Sam was thinking that kind of weapon would really make policing a bitch, when Sam caught sight of another one and took it out. As the man disintegrated the other creature, he said, "Xandoxans don't usually hunt in pairs, we need to go."

Sam just had to ask, "Seriously, a DeLorean?"

"It's always been the best way to travel through space and time. Don't mock because your people nearly had an automotive breakthrough in the eighties and then devolved. Don't you ever watch the movies?" Jerry, formerly Detective Barber, asked one of his oldest friends.

"You do realize we are going to have to talk about how it is that you are alive." Sam said a little too calmly.

"And you are just getting around to that now?" Jerry queried.

"I was a little distracted earlier and considering earlier distractions it didn't seem quite as impossible by comparison." Sam responded.

"OK. OK. But first, tell me about my delectable fiancee." Jerry asked around the time they were leaving Earth's orbit.

Epilogue

A spaceship landed in the Black Penny parking lot. That's right, a spaceship landed in the Black Penny parking lot. Oliver, Frank, and Noelle shot out of the bar followed by the rookies. They looked up and up and up.

Somewhere near the top they saw movement. There was a creature descending and it seemed to be all writhing arms and legs. Then about halfway through the descent, it suddenly came to a stop. But it was still too high to see anything clearly.

Sam Swarek hit an emergency stop. He figured an elevator was an elevator was an elevator, spaceship or not. Actually an elevator at a hotel was probably a superior elevator. He judged that halfway down was the sweet spot to keep prying eyes from below and above from getting an eyeful. Sam Swarek just wanted to spend a little more time alone with Andy McNally before they reached the ground and their friends and chaos erupted.

A cloaked figure above shouted down to the amorous couple, "If you couldn't keep your hands off each other for five damn minutes, you should have let me descend first. It's been more than a year, damn it. Now move."

Jerry was frustrated, extremely. Sam and Andy had not left their cabin the entire trip back to Earth. That just reminded him how long it had been since he'd been with Traci. Jerry had been faithful to his fiancee since his untimely passing and now he was here and she was 200ft below him and Sam and Andy couldn't keep their hands to themselves long enough to let him get down there.

When Andy took pity on Jerry and the descent resumed, the rookies below got nervous. Dov, who had filled out his off-duty carry request his first day on the job, pulled his weapon. Oliver Shaw barked at Epstein to lower his weapon and when he complied, Oliver resumed watching the descent with a grin.

When Sam and Andy touched the ground, Oliver rushed forward and scooped them up in a bear hug. Sam was right, mostly. There were a few moments of stunned silence and then chaos. Everyone was shouting questions. Frank Best seemed to be trying to take control, as if the site of an alien spaceship landing was the Parade room. It wasn't working. Then the cloaked figure began to descend from the spaceship. Dov pulled his weapon. Again.

This time it was Sam Swarek who barked for Dov to lower his weapon. Again Dov complied. It was one of those things that he and Shaw had drilled into the rookies. Even in the face of an alien invasion, obey your training officer. It probably needed to be added as an official addendum to 'The Talk', considering.

When the cloaked figure alighted, he used the return of stunned silence as an opportunity to explain what had happened, in a nutshell, "Sam and Andy saved this world, all worlds, from invasion by Xur and the Ko-Dan armada. Once Rylos fell, all worlds would tumble. Eventually Xur would have turned his eye towards Earth."

Traci, stunned, whispered, "Jerry? How?"

"I was dormant while my body repaired itself. I'll spare you all the boring details" Jerry answered as he pushed back his cloak, exposing his face. By some freak of nature humanoids developed on at least two worlds. He wasn't suddenly reptilian or anything.

"So you aren't some kind of alien feline species with nine lives?" Traci wasn't going to let it go. "What about the knife thing? I knew that was weird."

"It's a custom on my home world. Why don't you and I go find someplace private to talk about it?" Jerry asked suggestively. There wouldn't be very much talking until later, much later.

Their departure left Sam and Andy fielding a lot of questions. Cops always had a lot of questions. They eventually decided to move the conversation inside the Penny.

Frank was worried that Toronto would soon descend into chaos when its citizens realized aliens had landed, well three police officers in an alien spacecraft, one of whom was an alien, and wasn't that going to be fun to explain, so he asked "Shouldn't you do something about the ship?"

Sam pulled out a remote control thingy. It looked sort of like an iPhone. He pushed a button and the spaceship went 'poof'. All Sam knew was it was some kind of sci-fi woo woo. When Sam had asked Jerry about it, he would just mutter something about how Earthlings would be more advanced if they would stop getting reality and science fiction television mixed up. Yeah, Sam didn't get it either.

As the evening was winding down, it was time for Sam and Andy to break the bad news. Their return home was to be a temporary one. They were on a vacation of sorts. Xur had escaped; most of the Starfighters had been killed. Space was definitely in need of training officers. Sam Swarek and Andy McNally were the only ones to do the job.

They had come home to celebrate their marriage with friends and family, but sooner rather than later they were going to have to say farewell. Nothing as permanent as goodbye, Sam had a remote control thingy and Andy got what Andy wanted as far as Sam was concerned.

XXXXXXXXXX

Traci and Andy communicated silently as they ascended to the cockpit of the spaceship. They had decided on a double wedding and Traci would be leaving with them. Sam and Jerry had already taken Leo up to see the ship while the rookies shared a farewell.

Andy and Traci each hoped they would be as happy with their new husbands as Noelle was with Frank. They would be.

Oliver was going to be ok. He had known from the minute he met the witchy Celery that she was the one for him.

No, it was another couple of hard heads that Traci and Andy needed to knock together. As they threw their bouquets, Traci aimed at Gail while Andy aimed at Chris. Both got that smack in the head that they needed, the flowers tumbling into their hands. Both shouted "No" at the same time. But you can't fight fate. Well maybe you can fight fate, Gail certainly tried, but relentless friends are harder. Chris and Gail tried it again. It ended better this time. Or rather, it didn't end.

And from that night to this, you can find Dov Epstein at The Black Penny playing 'Star Raider', preparing himself for the day he joins Sam and Andy in the Star League to defeat the forces of Xur and save the galaxy.

"Rock 'n Roll, Swareks"

_A/N: Thanks to the movie 'The Last Starfighter' which apparently influenced me more as a kid than I realized. Also, thanks to my clothes dryer. I'm pretty sure it plays the theme to 'The Last Starfighter' when the laundry is done._

_Reviews are always appreciated. It helps me figure out how far is too far in the other fic about season 1. No space aliens in that one._


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